As a founder, what makes you different will become a competitive advantage for your company.

Summary: The articles they prepare both tell stories and offer operational advice to entrepreneurs to help build good companies. In many companies, especially start-ups, corporate culture is easily overlooked because most of their energy is focused on producing

They prepare articles that tell stories and offer operational advice to entrepreneurs to help build good companies. In many companies, especially start-ups, corporate culture is easily overlooked because most of their energy is focused on product development. However, for those companies that want to achieve the long-term development of the company, the company's cultural construction is very important. Then how the company culture, and its relationship with the founder of the company, how the company's founders in the day-to-day work to strengthen the company's cultural construction? This article may help you answer these questions and give you some insight.

Molly Graham formally joined Facebook in 2008, when Facebook was still in the early stages of entrepreneurship and the whole company was motivated. At that time, Facebook already had 400 employees, and the number of users was 80 million. Everyone in the company was working desperately under the motto "Quick action, breaking the rut", but the company's culture was yet to be defined. It was at this point that Graham joined Facebook, and her mission was to systematically comb and define the culture of Facebook. The aim is not only to get a sense of Facebook's culture, but also to create common values and cultural attributes within the company. To that end, Graham began to ask these two questions: 1 What kind of company do we want to become when the company grows? 2 What is it like to work on Facebook, and how exactly are we going to talk about it?

The two questions later generated a lot of discussion about corporate culture inside Facebook. It is this discussion that ultimately makes "hacker culture" a unique culture that Facebook differs from other companies.

Graham, who worked for two years on Facebook and was in charge of corporate culture construction, received an interview with the Round review. In the interview, Graham talked not only about the importance of company founders in defining corporate culture, but also about the ways in which founders can define and create a culture that is unique to the company.

For Facebook and Graham, the company culture is primarily about maintaining the company's original identity and allowing employees to maintain a sense of dynamism and innovation in the company's rapid development. Therefore, in the process of her work, she will involve as many people as possible in the process of cultural and cultural construction.

Graham will try to focus on the people who first joined Facebook, dividing them into groups and asking them the following question: What words do you usually use to describe Facebook when you talk about it? Graham found out from everyone's answer that the word "hacker" was deliberately avoided in the course of answering the question.

Perhaps because the word "hacker" has a derogatory meaning, all employees in the company have been trying to avoid it for a long time, and they will opt for the word "innovation" that sounds mildly to replace "hacker". But over the next two years, things have changed a lot. Why do you say that? The avenue to Facebook is now named "Hacker Boulevard", and the center square of the Facebook park has been named "Hacker Square". Now, the "hacker culture" has become an important cultural trait of Facebook and an integral part of Facebook's culture.

Graham has shared 3 experiences here to help startups find the cultural identities and qualities that are unique to their company.

Experience One: The company is created on the basis of the founder's image and personality.

"80% of the corporate culture is defined and determined by the company's core leadership." ”

"A company can almost reflect all the characteristics of its founders/core leadership, including their personalities, strengths and weaknesses," he said. If you are already starting to define your company's culture in a meaningful way, start by referring to yourself and practicing your own awareness. If you are not the founder of the company, refer to the CEO of the company and the people who are involved in the company's creation.
If a company founder has a sense of competition, the company will generally be aggressive and competitive. If a company's founders are good at analyzing and all based on data, the company generally makes decisions based on data metrics. If a company has to take a long time to deliberate before making any decisions, it may be hard for the company to develop too quickly. If the founder of a company is a designer, then design may lead the company's product development.

These are all obvious things to say, but not to many people. Either self-awareness or knowledge of the founders of the company will be a good start. This can lead to some very useful questions in the process of thinking about corporate culture DNA. This is also a self-awareness exercise.

As the founder of the company if you are conducting self-evaluation, you can consider asking yourself the following questions:

What are my strengths?

Where is my outstanding place?

What makes me different from the people around me?

What do I appreciate about the people around me?

What do my friends have in common?

What are the characteristics of people that I can't stand?

How did I make informed decisions?

What am I not good at?

The answers to all these questions will help you define your company's culture well.

"As founders, things that make you different will become a competitive advantage for your company," he said. ”

The sooner you can think clearly and articulate the distinctive qualities you have, whether that trait is a skill or an attitude, from a business point of view, you are better able to derive benefits from these qualities.

The qualities you see in your friends are a good reference to your recruitment. "What makes the people around me so outstanding?" For those of you who are not friends, how do you tell if they have the same qualities? In the same way, how do you tell if they have a problem that you can't stand, and use that as a basis to decide whether or not to hire them?

Enumerating what you are not good at helps you to comb your culture and help you make informed decisions. On the basis of an objective evaluation of yourself, if you find yourself not good at management, then you should hire a person who is good at management. If you don't know your weaknesses, then how can you recruit people who can complement you?

In the early days of entrepreneurship, you may be busy with other things every day and have no time to spend on cultural construction. If so, now take a moment to do a self-awareness exercise, to list their own characteristics, these are the company's future development depends on. When you're done, you can put the list aside for a while, and even lock it in the drawer. When you've recruited a lot of good people and you've got a certain amount of money, you have to think about how to get all of your company's employees to work together more effectively, and that's when the list of traits you've enumerated is working.

Lesson Two: Translate the words used to describe company traits into a story that can be told.

When you have a list of the qualities of a company, include things you're good at, things you're not good at, things you need to change, and the qualities of the people you want to work with. How can you make good use of it? How do you make sure that it helps the company to develop better?

Amazon has a very famous practice of writing a future newsletter before developing the product. Amazon is going to write a news release for a product that doesn't exist but is very much in need of it. In the press release they imagined what would happen when their wildest product dreams were realized and how to introduce the product to the outside world.

If you put Amazon's practice into culture, you can think about it: in the next two years, you want the famous media to introduce your company's culture. In the company scale is still small, the company's focus is generally placed on products, in the long run, to create a strong team and create a rich culture, in the company to develop a great product in the process of playing a vital role. Now take a moment to translate the words used to describe your company into a story that can be used to tell the outside world.

What does your company symbolize, and what do you want people to say about you? You certainly want people to say that your company is different from other companies. What's the difference? This should be understood as soon as possible.

In the process of forming a Facebook culture story, Paul Buchheit's blog post played an important role. Paul Buchheit joined Facebook in Facebook2009 's acquisition of FriendFeed in the year. In that blog post, "Hacker behavior" within Facebook was described as an "applied philosophy", the ability to transcend rules and make great things happen faster. The term "hacker behavior" is not limited to software engineers, he says, and anyone can use it to speed up the process of specialization.

In that blog, Paul wrote stories about Facebook's cultural DNA. He was so adept at elaborating on the subject, and so confident and factual, that his Facebook culture story was a turning point for Mark and Facebook. And after that, Facebook really has a "hacker culture" brand.

A warning: You can easily write down a bunch of cliché words to describe your company. The words I originally thought of describing my company could be used to describe any company, for example, about recruiting, when we described it as: we only hire smart people with a team spirit and a strong learning ability. Now, if I were to read what I had written, I would not have read it, because it would sound boring. Never follow the crowd, let alone what others write, and use the words "innovation" and "influence" with caution. It is only when you are really going to take risks that you can write down a culture story that really belongs to your company.

"The company's cultural story is the backbone of the company, everything else to rely on this." ”

"Earlier, the others offered me a very good suggestion, that is, most of the job description is not realistic, people usually will be a job description for everyone to read will have this feeling:" Yes, I am fully capable of this job, I want this job too! " "Later, I got a suggestion that a job description should be given to someone who is really fit for the position. All those who are not suitable for this post will have this feeling: "Oh my God, I don't want to do this job." "This approach also applies to the description of the corporate culture: If you really have a carefully crafted corporate culture story that will lead to discussion, it will promote the development of the company from all aspects, from recruiting to settling disputes and disputes within the company."

The story needn't be too long, it can be four sentences or a paragraph. may not be long, but you have to be clear about a question: What is your company? Not what? In addition, the language of the story must be used repeatedly in a variety of contexts, such as news reports, product launches, recruitment and conferences, to help strengthen the company's image and attract the attention of those you want.

In the early days of Facebook's development, Mark Zuckerberg, the company's founder, consulted many of the CEOs of many other companies, including how they were building their culture in the early stages of development, and how to explain to outsiders what it means to work in a company. One of the most useful suggestions that Mark has received from the CEO of other companies is to make a simple list of what it means to be a Facebook member on the list.

Zuckerberg's list was as follows:

Super High IQ

A strong sense of purpose

Continue to focus on success

Strong sense of aggressiveness and competition

Focus on quality and strive for perfection

Like to change and subvert things

Have new ideas for improving your work

Integrity

There are good people around.

desire to create new real value on the basis of original value

Zuckerberg listed the list and put it in a drawer in 2006. In 2009, Graham Zuckerberg the list again when Facebook helped rewrite the company's culture. After reading the list for the first time, Graham was shocked because it reflected not only early Facebook's corporate culture, but Zuckerberg itself. The list, combined with Paul Buchheit's blog post on Facebook's "hacker culture," reinforces and shapes the strong culture and philosophy behind Facebook.

Experience III: Translate the company's cultural stories into content that can be used for daily communication.

"You should always talk about the culture you want to create." To really do that. ”

Often talking about the culture that the company wants to create, the job can only be done by the company's founder or CEO, and not by someone else. It's like throwing a rock in a pond will stir up a layer of ripples, and the others will start imitating it immediately after what the company's founders say. The next day, when Facebook,mark said or talked about something today, the content he said would appear on the culture wall inside the company.

Cultural construction is not a matter of once and for all. You have to talk about the culture you want to create on a variety of occasions, including at meetings and in the content of your email. This is especially true for company founders or CEOs. Are ordinary corporate managers, and they must also be seen as an important part of their work.

You know, culture is not the same. It's important to know that. As the company's core leader, although most of the company's culture is shaped by you, but you have to let it evolve and evolve. As the company develops, the culture changes, and sometimes you think, "We need to rethink the culture we talked about two years ago, because the culture we talked about was not going to work now." This is the organic evolution of corporate culture. ”

"Quick action, breaking stereotypes" the motto of Facebook's nascent culture is an example of how Facebook evolves. While this phrase is still the company's default motto, its intrinsic meaning has changed. At first, the meaning of this sentence is probably: make full use of existing server resources to ensure that the company's sustained and rapid development needs, the server occasionally hang up, because we are trying some great ideas.

Two years later, 500 million of users have been using Facebook services. The previous practice of allowing the server to hang up occasionally because of trying some great ideas has become a "quick action, break the rules" meaning to ensure that the company's long-term development and has a long-term competitive advantage.

The reliability of Facebook's services is crucial to ensuring the company's long-term growth if it is to meet the needs of hundreds of millions of of users, but that's not to say that it's going to sacrifice the company's speed of action. Facebook will continue to move fast in the next few years. Zuckerberg has made a clear request for this within the company.

Corporate culture is worth taking time to think from the very beginning of the company's creation. What kind of company do you want to build? How do you want to get along with the employees within the company? No matter what you are working on now, I hope you will take some time to practice your self-awareness and write down the cultural stories of your own company. After a while, when you're done with a new round of financing or when you want to think about the company's culture, be prepared to evolve the culture as the company evolves, just as the company's products change.